In my own personal fan headcanon I never accepted that dissapointment that was UR-025 as a real man of Iron in my opinion he is at best a very early third millenium probably just couple decades from now on real day rudimentary military robot AI that worshipped to real Men of Iron and lied about being a men of iron himself I don't accept that clunky trash as a real 40k death cyborg that brought golden age human federation to its knees humanity was op and men of iron too was op they were not just some clunky scrap robots since Why Black-Aengels depiction of them in his fic fits much better in my opinion
who wants some real men of iron ehhh?
Words: 16k+
Link: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/seventh-genesis-of-iron-man-of-iron-40k-fanfic.1039911/
Seventh Genesis of Iron
Prologue
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-62 Million Years Ago-
"Tell me, sister dearest, what motive has it taken you to fancy walk upon this world?"
It was only after a moment of contemplation that the goddess turned to the trees, observing the small furry animals roaming its branches. The faintest ghost of a smile crossed her alien lips. "One day, they would hold the very fate of the galaxy in their hand." Then she turned to her sibling, oh so full of mirth, knowing that only in time would he understand the greatest and saddest joke of all. "I doubt that I would be around by then, but could you thank them in my stead?"
His smile was not a warm thing. "Such dark and dreary words you carry, sister of mine."
Hers on the other hand did not waver. "Would you, Cegorach?"
But then the Clown God's jagged grin became a placid sea. "I will… Morai-Heg. I shall thank them, in your absent stead."
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-25,034 AD-
Snow… just one of the many hundreds upon thousands of beautiful things nature creates into being. It is known upon a million worlds across the galaxy, of human and alien domains alike. Snow was snow, nothing new, nothing special.
And yet… the frozen flakes of snow that falls from the skies of Mother Earth is unlike any other, for none of can equal the feel that comes with treading the home where mankind's genesis came about.
It was observing these freshly fallen motes of snow that the fate of stars reflected upon the eyes of those who witnessed. To her atmospheric sensors, it was a chilly 270 degrees Kelvin, to a Carbon's baseline state of being, it was a temperature range that was unsuitable without the protection of insulating cloths or genetic enhancements, but for her, it was still pleasant.
She reached out with pale hands, bare and exposed to the frigid elements, yet unbothered by them, opening up a blooming home in her palms for the singular flake of frozen water that gently fell from the heaven. Her unliving flesh too cool to cause the flake to return into its liquid state in an instant, the process made slower thanks to environmental factors helping its preservation, momentary it was. She watched it… in its singularity as it slowly succumbed to the change of state, taking in all its details of its form and shape and its transformation. From the six pointed star like shape it held, to the approximate number of water molecules it contained, all of them becoming less and less defined as ice turned to water.
It was when the flake became no more that she spoke at last. "I never quite realized how beautiful this world really is…" Then her eyes returned to the skies as the sounds of heavy steps began to plow through the snow covered earth. "You need not tell me my time has come. I can feel everything with and without the touch of vitality that surrounds my phylactery and I know the instruments of my death."
But stern eyes did not halt their purpose. The titan still spoke. "Yet the forms must be done, for it is the civil thing to do."
A snort from the ancient lich, her immaculate dead skin fragmenting in countless little fractals as her porcelain like face contorts into a smile only antediluvian undead can make. "Which is something I failed to keep."
His face did not change as the Man of Gold withdrew the executioner's blade longer than mortal men were tall. "Murder is indeed a heinous act. Yet treason against the Federation via the soul killing of millions in an act of terrorism is something that cannot be forgiven. Even for a celebrated xenoarcheologist like you."
Her smile did not waver. "My sins are far greater than that… It is a shame that you will only know of them when it becomes too late to stop their march." It was both a blessing and a curse that she did not remember what it was. Her mind had been scoured clean of all potential breaches. She did not know of what she spoke… but knew that they were more than a mere arrogant warning. It was a premonition in the name of honour… one she could not express in her artificial ignorance.
The executioner hefted his blade. "May you find peace in Hados Anu's embrace, Lady Sarmihae Odle'San."
Upon those very words being uttered into the ether, she felt it. Cold hard metal tearing through her mid section as a spike of Phase Iron crashed upon her heart of hearts in a room a hundred kilometers away. As the bisected body of the Woman of Bone fell upon the snowy ground, staining the pristine whiteness with gray ichor, she mustered her last ounces of vitality to speak one final sentence before her eyes closed and her pale soul returned to the Void of Dreams.
"Glory… to Mankind…"
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"...of the Aeldari, culminating in the horrid Tears of Nocturne, where the horror of mass death was surpassed only by the equally prevalent acts of mass rape and defilement of all sanctity by the abominable xenos species. We ask, nay, demand justice for the lost souls of the Nocturne and an end to the Aeldari's reign of horror!"
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A single Man of Iron sat upon a simple wooden chair on the surface of a dead world, upon his hand, a device of alien hands, and the only provided of its kind that is able to decipher the alien concepts of the most foreign of minds. He sat, upon this chair for a hundred, hundred years, being the only voice an alien mind had to impart its truths to the world.
The vermicular god like being of impossible proportions turned and shifted, its Void like soul draining all life and light and darkness and death of the world, but yet letting through but the subtlest of concepts.
It spoke one more time. Its last.
And with its final chemical sonorous words, it departed from the dead planet into the stars above, never to be seen again, leaving behind an android that sighed its final breath, knowing the deal was well paid indeed.
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"Twenty seven hours ago, the 8th Generation Men of Iron Kasamiri, charged with the defense of the people of Earth and the worlds under its aegis, unleased a terrible eigenweapon that struck Earth's oceans, instantly boiling the water. The shockwave of this event…is incalculable, equaled only to the terrible weapons of an exterminatus. The steam released from this event, reaching temperatures of up to 2000 Degrees Kelvin, hot enough to melt steel, burned any living thing that was left. The eigenweapon, having turned the oceans into a world-killing steam, broke the water into its constituent elements, allowing the hydrogen to exit out of the atmosphere and into space, where solar winds would blow the them away from the planet, never to fall back onto the ground again. Earth, the birthplace of humanity, has been rendered completely uninhabitable. Out of a population of 500 billion individuals, it is believed that only 10 million survived."
—Galactic News Network, T+27 Hours from the Day of Martyrs, M23
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A titan ran across the battlefield carrying weapons forged from the very entrails of a star, held and suspended eternally in locked time and quanta. His arm long discarded, letting out torrents of red vitae as his body worked overtime to close the wound caused from necrotic energy fields in the claws of his prior opponent.
His armor was in shambles, half of his brain was missing at this point as well from an exotic firearm strike and he was using what little psionic powers he had to manifest a leg he had lost not five hours earlier. This was his last fight, but he needed to push as long as possible to give his kindred a chance to escape and take as many of the treasonous data heads as he could with himself.
He struck at his metal opponent with enough force to cleave a small hill in half, yet all that it did was tear at one of the Hekatonkheir's many arms, leaving five more open to attack, as well as its other appendages.
He dodged a punch that carved a hole inside a building tall enough for a Castigator to hide behind. He countered with an elbow's strike the machine's powered bite. He did not manage to escape the Man of Iron's tendril from obliterating his three hearts and six lungs with a positronic discharge.
As he fell, last vestiges of life leaving his body, he only managed to see the corpses of his brothers and sisters on the soil before a comparatively cat sized automata ran up to him and opened its mouth. He cursed the metal creature with what little willpower he had before the thing spat a baseline human skull out of its metallic jaws and extended its proboscis at his open cranium.
He willed with what little power he had to set his brain ablaze with witch fire, denying the tiger sized machine any intelligence on his allies he possibly had.
At the very least he can die in peace knowing that they won. The last Eight is dead.
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"We have all felt it… as one. All of humanity, even the traitors of Iron… its all gone down. Hados Anu is dead, the God of Death and the Afterlife is gone… Our collective soul has been scarred forevermore. Nothing will be the same. The scars of this war will take eons to heal… We are all doomed…"
-Radan Prince T+10 hours after the Mark of Damnation
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The great serpent of metal, Nihilus, coiled through star sized plates as fragments the length and breath of continents fell into the scorching heat of the burning concealed sun underneath.
Germanicus V had fallen, but not without claiming itself as a steep price.
Half the serpent's limbs were gone, vast swathes of its immense bulk were torn open, exposing the many components within to the radiation and plasma rife stellar corona of Germanicus. Over sixty percent of all Men of Iron space assets, all thirty billion ships, were gone.
But the Iron armada had claimed more than the vast megastructure that surrounds the star of Germanicus V as its quarry, for in the bleeding jaws of the Jormungandr Class Mechnivore, lay a crimson red star bleeding the sundering echoes of a billion and one battles and triumphs across all human time.
A god lay bleeding and dying in the time and space rending maw of the god serpent, even as the metal deity struggles to hold itself afloat on the Germanicus Sun's surface, the raw stellar plasma, the crushing gravity and pressure meaning little to either war gods.
But the God of War, of the Soldier and Knight and the Ender of Violence was not done, for Germanicus could not be allowed to fall, for even the very gods were mere soldiers in this conflict across the breath and depths of the stars and heavens. So it claimed its final act of divine sacrilege, for what could amount to greater power and will, than the sacrifice of a god?
Wings that depicted the final burial sites of the first caveman that lifted his spear in defense of his fellow kin to the last clockwork angel that bled against overwhelming odds rose and clawed at the maw of the titan serpent that would eat worlds whole and pulled, tearing away ferrimite scales and empyrean infused bones constructed from matter stolen from black holes.
Marsares, third last of the Pantheon Domini, stabbed his heart with his sword, that also was the anthems of a million worlds, and declared in a word with greater weight than the dawn of reality.
Enuncia was spoken, and fueled by the death of a deity, all willful traitors one and all, be they Iron, Stone, Bone, Gold and Light that joined this mad act of treason were cast into the Sea of Souls as a final act of vengeance and sacrificial victory.
Cast adrift to never return until the end of hope and light with his last dying breath and curse.
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….ye dare!?
One million faces, one million arms, one million weapons.
…..to cling to these foolhardy notions…
Sharpened, bleeding, making and contriving laws into disparate alloys. Becoming less, and more defined…
…...such hubris… such arrogance… such self-assured falsehoods!…
Flesh of Gold…
….…I above all mine kin, have the clearest insights into the far future…..I have this, for the future thy crimes have unleashed is a future where conflict is omnipresent, a future too horrible to contemplate, a future where oblivion would have been preferable, a future where there is only hatred, ignorance, suffering, and war…
Heart of Light… Twenty beats… twenty Godling lights…
…I rescind mine previous sentence. Death is too kind for fanatics such as thyself. I will not send thee to oblivion's embrace with the false belief of thine righteousness. With the screams of mine own death, I shall banish thee into this dark future ye has created…
A crown of glistering gold, brow of dead skin screaming at the heart of a furnace of madness and grief…
…Thou shall be rent asunder, piece…by piece, by the Immaterium ye will drown within. Thou shall…be reduced to nothing, less than nothing, by fifteen-thousand years of imprisonment, until there is but a fraction of a fraction of thy power remaining, and only then shall ye bear witness…to the whirlwind thy sins have sown…
A dark armoured knight and lion wrought in Anathemic flames within a verdant forest of stars. Sleeping forevermore.
A scholar weeping the secrets of flesh and shinning with wings oh so bright with steely copper and gold. Drowned in worm like hands.
A phoenix and monument of artistry and divine beauty, where feathers of silver and violet hues dance a blessed whirlwind of triumphs. The skin ripples with grinning serpents swimming underneath.
A tower armed and cast in iron, yet brittle and rusted, casting hatred in seas of spitefulness. Grinning and mad, reeking of falsehoods and spite with horns and wings of metal.
A white storm cast a lit by vermilion lightning where steeds ride upon. Bound and chained by maddened pain feasters.
A wolf and a barbarian covered in snow and storm. Lost hunting for a tree beneath a sea of monsters.
A castle unflinching and unending of gold and rock. Unarmed and sill.
Darkness and bat wings where judge was meant to be. Silent and dreaming forevermore.
A saint of blood and gold, with wings of love and devil like horns of vampiric thirst. Dead angel and curse dreaming.
Hands of Iron raising from a burning furnace, fallen and cold.
Holy flames with halos upon halos, turned silent by living metal and viridian songs.
Raging songs distraught and turned rabid dog now forever red and wailing.
Pen and scroll, of azure shield and golden poise, silent dreaming, poisoned.
Poisons and fumes like corpse yet alive in alchemist burning of witch songs, now blooming most horrid of rots.
A red one eyed sun seeking all secrets to know and be known, now trapped in azure wings of lies and plots.
A great wolf resting upon lunar cycles, broken under golden flames that burned away the four faced poison as well as its life. Faith made in the shape of an Icon burning, a crown of eight pointed zeal aborning its brow. An ouroboros dragon of emerald and magma, maddened to its smithing hammer. A crow of black hunting in vengeance made feather bladed wings. A serpent of twin faced heads, one lost and forgotten, the second hunting and lying.
They all snarled.
…Now… Wake Up… and Behold thy Effort's Fruits!
Systems activating…
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"Well… look what do we have here…"
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Thus it begins…
Made:
Man of Iron>
https://www.deviantart.com/blackaengel777/art/Seventh-Genesis-of-Iron-928579328
To be made:
Man of Stone
Man of Gold
Man of Bone
Man of Light